PowerPoint Slideshow about 'Rescuing THE TALENTED' - nariko

Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author.While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server.

Although American troops had played a major part in defeating Germany and Austria in the Great War (World War I), European allies France and Britain resisted President Woodrow Wilson’s ideas for a postwar peace. Wilson (center, above) wanted an international League of Nations to promote peace, free trade with all nations, and disarmament to the point of ending most 1919 “weapons of mass destruction” (airplanes, submarines, etc.). Europeans refused to support these ideas.

Americans were also disturbed by the Russian Revolution (1917-23) in which the communist government of Vladimir Lenin (above) offered the appeal of socialism to all whose without property. American voters began to fear all “foreign elements” including immigrants.

Prior to the Great War, immigration into the US was relatively easy and heavy (up to 2-3 million per year average from 1900 to 1915). Voters after 1919 demanded reductions in the number of new immigrants.

Congress created a new, permanent “quota system” after 1920, which limited the number permitted per year and favored western Europeans who were middle-class, over other ethnicities and lower income groups.

This would have a marked effect on the post-1920 changes in American culture – fewer immigrants from Europe were laboring class, many were artists and intellectuals.

Post-war Germany was in chaos, with heavy inflation (it took 1 billion marks to buy bread in 1923), a government that was unable to do much, and an emerging culture that rejected many pre-war values. The “Weimar culture” gained popularity. It had impact on theater, art, music, film, and literature.

Germany’s Jews (about one-half percent of the population) had more freedom in the Weimar era, but , many Germans believed after the war that Jews had somehow “betrayed” the nation and caused the defeat. Anti-Semitic rhetoric in speeches and print were common and even carried over into money – the “noltgeld” (temporary paper script issued in 1921) had anti-Jewish images.

European artists, drawing in theater, art and revolutionary street demonstrations, expanded modern art. Reflecting the massive destruction of the Great War, men like Andre Breton emphasized “the art of unreason.” The word “dad” appears to have been made up. Breton (above left) called dada “anti-war” while Georg Grosz, one of the artists, said his work (“Automatons, above right) exposed a “world of mass emptiness.”

Spanish artist Salvador Dali’s “Persistence of Memory,” suggested that if even time was flexible (as Einstein’s theory suggested) then all values (faith, patriotism, success) may not reflect anything that was “real.”

Newly independent from the Austrian empire, Hungary was also going through turmoil – artists (like Korda) were influenced by German and Austrian ideas in the arts.

But, unlike Austria and Germany, Hungary’s government was committed to old traditions. Under the quasi-dictatorship of Admiral Horthy, Hungary’s government repressed film-makers, writers, and others who did not conform to strict guidelines.

As a result several Hungarians became a group of “intellectual refugees,” leaving for other countries.

A rebel by nature, Arthur Koestler sympathized with the Hungarian Bolsheviks when they briefly controlled Budapest in 1919. When Admiral Horthy crushed the Bolsheviks, Koestler moved to Vienna and wrote for leftist journal. He eventually joined the Communist party, but renounced the movement after witnessing the Red purges in Spain in 1937-38. He would move on to France and then the U.S.

Igor Stravinsky (a Russian of Polish ancestry) changed ballet with his up-tempo Firebird Suite and Rite of Spring. Leaving Russia for France after the Bolshevik revolution, he rewrote compositions for player-pianos (using note combinations that human hands could not perform).

In 1939 he went to the US, partly to escape the growing war. He conducted symphonies, wrote some short, popular pieces – and was fined for performing an “improved” Star-spangled Banner in Boston.

Since 1924, the U.S. had carefully restricted immigration through a quota system. Even if a person could find a place on the quota list he or she could be rejected if the American consul feared he/she would be a “public charge” – someone who would not earn enough and become a welfare recipient.

Americans who would file an affidavit, promising to support an immigrant, could help a person overcome this “public charge” obstacle.

An America of influence could thus help many – giving advantages to the upper class.

Without “friends in high places to get to America, an applicant had difficulty.

Employees of the State Department, often educated at ivy league schools, were members of a fairly elite set. Hugh Teller, assistant immigration consul at Stuttgart, admitted that he investigated applicants for visas for any “communist associations.” He saw many artists as “subversives.”

The most virulent anti-Semites in Germany were the members of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, whose leader, Adolf Hitler, had written in his autobiography that Germany could have won the World War by killing thousands of “Jewish traitors” in Germany with poison gas.

Once Hitler took power, Jewish artists and intellectuals looked for asylum in Britain, France, the US or Palestine.

In 1937, the Reich Ministry for the Arts sponsored an exhibition of “degenerate art” – work by Jews, socialists and “sexual deviants” that were to be destroyed. The showing was brief (too many wanted to see them) and most were not destroyed but sold overseas to raise money for Nazi leaders.

In the war years (1939-45) Nazi leaders would steal artworks from Poland, France, Russia – all of Europe).

A correspondent for Living Age , Varian Fry persuaded a group in New York to create the “Emergency Rescue Committee,” in 1940. Armed with a suitcase of cash and emergency entry visas (permits to live in the US as refugees), Fry went to France to find and help artists, writers, and political opponents of the Nazis leave France. Ultimately, he aided some 2000 immigrants.

Among those Fry aided with his entry visas were -- Dadist/activist Andre Breton and Hanna Arendt, who would contribute numerous books to political sociology (most famously in Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem).

French Artist Duchamp contributed to numerous innovations in art, including Dadism (he adorned a cheap print of the Mona Lisa with a goatee and a label suggesting she was a whore), Surrealism (Nude Descendingna Staircase), and Readymade art (the bicycle wheel and stool).

Multi-talented, he experiments with new music and played chess for France in international tournaments.

In 1944, the US government created the War Refugee Board (with Cordell Hull, Henry Morgenthau, and Henry Stimson as directors). The Board administered efforts to bring “endangered” war refugees to the US.

Camps for refugees were created, mostly from military camps in Germany. The camps were guarded by Allied military personnel, but the camp inhabitants created their own administrative government including police forces, and handled most of their own affairs.

In 1952, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, which 1) maintained quotas per nation 2) limited most classes of immigrants to 270,000 per year and 3) forbade immigration of any applicant with socialist-communist ties.